


Fire at the Heart

by architeuthis



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, loads of corpses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 11:16:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3172380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things come to a head between Dorian and the Inquisitor after the deaths of Clan Lavellan. This story diverges from canon partway through the Clan Lavellan war table mission chain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire at the Heart

**Author's Note:**

> It may be helpful to be aware of this slightly janky [alternate Dorian first kiss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRVutqk4Chg). Be advised that there will be kink later in this story; appropriate tags to follow. All titles are from the Canticle of Transfigurations.

After the pyre was lit, after the songs were sung, the Inquisitor walked into the river. He threw his jacket and his shirt onto the bank as he waded in; Dorian finally looked away when he began undoing his belt.

One of Lavellan's saddlebags bulged with spare clothing and cold-weather gear. Dorian unbuckled it, then picked his way down the slope and around the remains of a caravan. It was mostly gone, half charred two days ago during the attack, half broken up for firewood today; flies droned over the crusted blood among what was left. Upwind and uphill at the camp, the smell of burning bodies had just begun to reach them, but down here in the valley the reeks of death and old smoke were immediate.

It had taken hours. Dorian was exhausted just from standing, from watching, from doing nothing and chafing at the leash of someone else's traditions. "This is absurd," he had said to Dalish, after an age of fruitless pacing and a half-dozen rejected plans to help. "It's _cruel_. 'You there, strapping young man! You look like you're grieving the most! Tell me, have you considered a sideline in undertaking?'"

"You shit yourself when you die," she had snapped back. She'd been the one to shoot down his suggestions; Lavellan had barely spoken since they found the first body, five minutes' ride back along the river. She might have been slightly tired of him. "You know that if anyone does, necromancer. Who would you rather sent you back to the Beyond, the person who was closest to you, or some shem who'll wrinkle his nose over your corpse because of the smell?"

"All right," Dorian said, leaning on his staff, "firstly—" Oh, this was going well. "You can't call me 'necromancer' in one breath and squeamish in the next. Let me assure you, my good woman, that those things never coexist. And second—" He sighed and looked down into the valley, where Lavellan was arranging a body atop the pyre, smoothing its hair with his bloodied hands. "That's it, no palaver about the person who loves you best opening the door to Heaven? Just, 'it's less embarrassing this way'?"

"I wouldn't know anything about that," said Dalish. "I'm no keeper. I just know who I trust to see me like that and who I don't."

"That can't possibly apply to situations like this. Your lover dies, your friend, your father, fine. But he's one man, and that's his _whole clan_." Dorian cast about for support. Maker knew why, when he'd gotten none thus far. Vivienne continued pointedly filing her nails atop the collapsible stool she kept in her saddlebag for this sort of occasion; the Iron Bull had stretched out in the grass, and might have been asleep. A couple of the other Chargers glanced up from their nearly silent game of diamondback. All right. Dorian turned his attention back to Lavellan, a small figure streaked with gore among small figures streaked with gore. "I can't—I can't imagine losing even one relative and just—being all alone with it like that."

Dalish softened a little. "We're here, aren't we? If he wanted our help he would have asked for it by now. He can do that. But if he needs this, he won't thank you for interrupting."

Dorian had grumbled a little more, but he had crouched down beside her with his staff resting against his shoulder, and the rest of his vigil over this funeral had felt a little less useless.

The washing-up afterward must not have been sacrosanct, because Dalish made no effort to call him back now. He slowed as he approached, as though Lavellan might turn and bite, but all that happened was Lavellan saying, "There's soap in there." His voice sounded ravaged. Earlier it had cracked and then failed as he sang over the just-lit pyre, until first Dalish and then Skinner had taken up the hymn. "Under the—yes. Thank you." Lavellan caught the soap out of midair and immediately dunked himself. He came up streaming with blood and soot and water, and set about lathering his hair.

This was almost too plausible a way for Dorian to see Lavellan naked for the first time. If Varric were here, if he knew that the gaps in Dorian's days had recently been filled with speculation about how and when and _whether_ this might happen, he would have scoffed. Bathing in a river like some wild man? Trite fantasy. It was about the least sexy thing Dorian had seen in his life: Lavellan with his hollow eyes, shivering in hip-deep mountain runoff while suds ran pinkish-greyish down his back.

"How—" Dorian stopped himself. How are you? Holding up well? How do you feel, standing here and breathing smoke from the corpses of two dozen people you loved?"

"Yes?" said Lavellan, rubbing his neck with a soapy hand.

"Er, I meant to ask if you wanted your privacy."

"Honestly, I appreciate the company." Lavellan looked up toward the lip of the valley where the rest of them had made their camp, then back at Dorian. "It's been good, having you all here. Better than it would have been. I suppose you don't have the option of leaving, but thank you all the same." He sighed. "Listen to me talk," he said, and submerged himself again.

Dalish couldn't possibly have heard from this distance, and Dorian refused to look up to see if she was watching them. "Yes, Inquisitor," he said when Lavellan came up for air, "that was quite the speech. Under the circumstances, I think you've license to run on as much as you like. As many as seven or eight sentences in a row would not be unforgivable."

Lavellan only shook his head. Dorian thought he spied a smile through the V of Lavellan's arm as he wrung out his hair, but just for a moment. Perhaps now was not the time for charming banter. The remaining items in Dorian's toolkit were impeccable grooming and the ability to bend death to his will, of which he rejected one for inapplicability and the other for tactlessness. He could leave, of course: head back up to camp and provide silent emotional support from a distance. Apparently that meant something in Lavellan's world. Or he could stay, he supposed. And provide silent emotional support. From fifteen feet away.

Not two days before they'd set out on their grand rift-closing tour of the Free Marches, Dorian had kissed Lavellan. In the library, even, like a besotted schoolboy. No, worse: as a schoolboy he had been occasionally besotted, but never desperate. He'd never looked at a person and thought, _If this one man can think so much of me, all of my terrible decisions might be worth it._ He'd never kissed someone while brimming with gratitude and surprise that they would stand up for him against a figure of authority, because in his boyhood he had never needed it, and this last hard year of his adulthood had taught him never to expect it. Until practically the moment their mouths had met, he'd had no idea what he was about to do, and he had been nurturing a suspicion that the thought of two men together had not crossed Lavellan's mind prior to that nasty scene with Dorian's father a few weeks before. On the road with the Iron Lady and a group of bawdy mercenaries did not strike him as the ideal scenario for a follow-up, so Dorian had let it lie, for the time being.

Lavellan had seemed no different than usual. Polite, plain-spoken, tended to sit near Dorian at a campfire or table, if it was an option. All normal. No awkwardness had sprung up between them, but neither had any new tension. Not for the first time, Dorian missed Tevinter awfully. The south seemed to have a thriving population of perfectly open and unquestioned invert couples, but Dorian hadn't an inkling how any of them had identified each other, short of simply announcing themselves upon meeting. If this had been Minrathous, Dorian would have started tying his robe a little differently after the destruction of Haven, Lavellan would have seen it for the invitation it was, and the two of them could have had this all out months ago and gotten back to the business of saving the world. He would _know_ whether there was anything to have out.

Instead he knew—what? That Lavellan generated controversy just by breathing and didn't mind that Dorian's presence in the Inquisition attracted more, that the advances of another man were not completely objectionable to him, and that when he read a book or signed documents, he liked to do it at the table near Dorian's nook in the library, sometimes for hours at a go, saying hardly a word. That silent companionship meant something to him.

Fine. Dorian crouched on the bank with his forearms on his thighs and the saddlebag at his feet, and stared upriver, into the woods: a pleasanter view than downriver, where the pyre and the wreckage of three caravans lay, and more decorous than watching Lavellan. Some of what he'd already seen would doubtless come back to him later—Lavellan was grieving a terrible loss, yes, but also wet and muscular and tattooed head to foot—but he could feel bad about that when the time came. They exchanged no further words until Lavellan finished his bath and came splashing up out of the river. Dorian fished a cloak from the saddlebag and stood, shaking it out; Lavellan came to him, and Dorian slung the cloak around him.

With less than a foot separating them now, Dorian could see Lavellan fighting his teeth's attempts to chatter. "One moment," he said when Lavellan made to back away, holding him fast by the collar of the cloak. The fabric went warm between his fingers. Dorian sought out along the wool—no, not inward, not down into the complexities of the weaver's work or the structure of the fiber, just find the outline—until he had the shape of the garment in his mind, and let heat spill out into the rest of it.

Lavellan made a surprised noise, perhaps almost a laugh. "Thank you," he said, pulling the cloak tighter around himself. His wet hair steamed against the collar.

"The pleasure's all mine." Dorian touched Lavellan's cold cheek. Lavellan sucked his breath back in sharply and looked up into Dorian's eyes, affording Dorian the unfortunate privilege of watching the facade come down at last. Lavellan's face crumpled, and for an instant Dorian saw far down into the wounds this day had dealt him. Then he twisted away from Dorian's fingertips on his face, the same way Dorian had seen him contort out of holds on the battlefield.

"No," he said, raggedly and only half to Dorian, pressing his still-damp face into the shoulder of the cloak. " _Not_ now."

"I—" Dorian opened and closed his empty hands, opened and closed his mouth. "Very well. What would you have of me?"

Lavellan had backed off a few feet, but he approached again to pull fresh clothing from his saddlebag, granting Dorian front row seats to the reconstruction of the walls, stone by agonized stone. "Nothing," he said as he stepped into a pair of trousers, in a voice like a saw across metal. "We march on Wycome."

* * *

The sewers of Wycome drained among the cliffs that staggered their way up from the sea to the plateau where the city stood. Each great stone mouth was deeply eroded; not Tevinter original, but old enough that the memory of Tevinter civil engineering had lived here the last time they were refurbished.

This was where Dorian's choices had led him. Proud and homesick over a sewer, after months trudging through the ruin-punctuated wilderness of southern Thedas, at the heels of a literal barefooted peasant who sometimes scraped things off trees or rocks and ate them while Dorian watched.

"Vivienne," Lavellan said, as they approached an iron grate that blocked the tunnel from ceiling to floor. He had at least put on proper boots for this incursion. Hopefully he could be convinced to throw them away once this was over.

"My darling," Vivienne said, "I have not set foot in this city since I was a child. Whatever it gave to me, it has taken much more from you, and by all reports this new duke is an upstart and a blackguard. You have my complete support in any decision you make. Although I'm afraid these boots are quite ruined." Dorian swallowed a laugh.

Lavellan paused. "Thank you. I was going to ask you to open this."

"Ah. Of course, dear man." She raised her hand, and the grate went red-hot; she pushed, and it glowed white, then folded itself back against the walls of the tunnel, dripping beads of molten metal into the, for want of a better term, water.

She destroyed three more grates in this fashion on their journey up to street level. It had never crossed Dorian's mind that sewers might have road signs, but these did, carved into the walls in Tevene and King's Tongue: this way to the merchant quarter, this way to Festival Row. The fourth gate lay flush with the street itself, and Vivienne blew it high into the air, to fall with a clang somewhere out of sight. The Iron Bull boosted the rest of them out of the sewer, then let Aclassi and that Grim fellow haul him up.

Dorian looked up from this spectacle to see that the Wycome alienage had burned.

A few paces down the street, Lavellan stood rolling something under his foot—a bone, black with char. An escapee from the nearby pyre, from the looks of it, and from the looks of it the pyres were where the blaze had begun. Dorian had seen alienages, since leaving Tevinter—Lavellan insisted on visiting the local one every time they were in a major city, to speak to the elves there and let them see him, the great hope of elvenkind. Dorian had seen how they were built, out of scrap wood and thatch and old sails. This one would have gone up like a tinderbox. Stone structures stood here and there, and in a few places much of some smoldering building remained, but by and large he could see straight to the high stone walls that bounded the district. A place like this, it would have been a simple matter to bar the exits and let it burn itself out. Smoke blurred the stars; he could smell it, now that his nose was beginning to wake up.

The Iron Bull closed his massive hand on Lavellan's shoulder. "Hey. We knew they probably would've hit this place before they hit your people."

Lavellan nodded slowly. His expression had reached the pinnacle of studied blankness. _These are my people too,_ he'd said to Dorian once. _Or I'm their person. Who else has the power I do, and will look out for them?_ The light of their lingering death-fires sparked off his eyes.

"Let's go fuck 'em up," Bull said.

* * *

The gates were unguarded—why bother?—and few people in the streets at this hour were prepared to tangle with even a small armed force containing at least two obvious mages. The commoners they did pass seemed not quite right, and what resistance they met came in the form of guards who shook and swayed and crackled. A merchant in his pajamas, roused by the sound of a brief sad battle with a city guard patrol, explained about the disease that had swept Wycome from the noble quarter outward. The elves had carried it, passed it on to their rich employers; that was why they were immune, even though they drank filthy water unpurified by Duke Antoine's new filtration system. The merchant showed them a well, and the red crystals in its depths that scrubbed the sickness from the water.

Lavellan could be hard to draw out, but Dorian had never seen him speechless.

What mattered was that when he did speak, the people believed him, or they believed the insignia on his shoulder and the green light that flickered from his palm when they asked to see where Andraste had touched him. The Inquisition took the ducal palace not through the stable gate or over the battlements, but from the front, pushing through ranks of trembling, red-eyed guardsmen. The crowd that had rallied under an Inquisition banner unfurled from somewhere by Aclassi—clever, that man—called to their friends and siblings and children in the guard, and around them the raised swords of Wycome lowered one by one. At last Lavellan threw the duke bodily down on the floor of his great hall, and sat on Antoine's own throne to sentence him.

After this came at least two hours of delivering orders, sending out messengers and releasing carrier birds: to Skyhold, to Estwatch and Hercinia and Markham, to the Dalish clans of the Free Marches, to Marquise Briala, to Inquisition outposts all along the Marches coast. Dorian was no particular use for this part, so he excused himself to wash up, do something about what currently passed for his hair, and see if there was any truth to the rumors about Wycome being a major importer of Antivan wine.

When he next looked for Lavellan, business had been concluded in the great hall and the functionaries had dispersed. Lavellan himself was easy enough to find, after a certain amount of wandering: just follow the sounds of violence being done to furniture. When Dorian entered what he presumed to have been the duke's study, Lavellan was in the process of toppling a bookshelf, with a crash Dorian imagined to be quite satisfying.

This continued for most of a minute while Dorian watched. Lavellan swept the mantel clear with his arm and tore a mounted bear's head off the wall, and was about to do _something_ with a fireplace poker when he noticed Dorian in the doorway and it all stopped at once, like an enchantment with its power cut. The poker rattled dully on the carpet and Lavellan, panting, drew himself up straight in the center of the wreckage.

Maker forgive Dorian, but all that tightly leashed violence was sexy.

"Don't stop on my account," he said. "Or do, because I've brought you wine. Your choice."

Lavellan seemed not to know what to make of this, or perhaps not to have entirely heard. Dorian invited himself over to a settee that had escaped the wrath of the dread Inquisitor and sat, then poured the two goblets in his left hand half-full from the bottle in his right. He held one out and watched over the rim of the other as Lavellan approached him, slowly and obliquely, as though he feared one or the other of them would spook. His bare left foot left irregular bloody prints on the rug.

"I'm sorry you saw that," he said as he took the cup from Dorian. Their fingers touched; Dorian tried not to overthink it. Lavellan sniffed his wine, not like a connoisseur but like he wasn't altogether sure what it was. Dorian briefly recalled the version of this man he had gotten from tales before they met in Redcliffe: an elf of the wilds, savage and unlettered as any beast but inexplicably, arcanely blessed. "It was childish and wastef— This tastes like _leather_."

"Everything from Antiva tastes like leather." Dorian bit back the _including the men_ that customarily followed that joke. "You know, I don't think anyone would fault you if you executed Antoine but spared his personal effects."

Lavellan sat, frowning into his drink, and put his bloody feet up on the tea table. "If I'm seen not to carry out my vendetta against him, it creates slack. I can pursue other agendas with fewer questions."

"Other agendas such as giving whatever's left of Wycome over to the elves?" Dorian put his cup down a safe distance from Lavellan's feet and perched at the edge of the settee to look at the damage.

"You don't have to do that," Lavellan said softly. His free hand twitched like he was thinking of touching Dorian's exposed shoulder, but nothing came of it.

"Don't I?" Dorian held up the sliver of ceramic he'd extracted from Lavellan's foot, and Lavellan looked gratifyingly chastened. "No one's quite figured out your game here, have they? It's beautiful to watch, I'll have you know. The history books they write about you are going to be fascinating."

"You worked it out."

" _I_ am a good deal sharper than the average person, and I've seen what red lyrium does to a body. Three quarters of the people in this city and almost all of the nobles will be dead or out of commission by the time elves start arriving from Hercinia. Attract enough of them and they might outnumber the humans. What I want to know is, do you intend them to rule here? _Hold still_." Dorian wasn't a healer, but he could at least stanch the bleeding and make sure Lavellan's foot scabbed quickly, if he would _stop wriggling_.

"I don't know _who_ to install. It can't be a human. It can't be an elf."

"No one will care for a while yet," Dorian said idly. "Once things calm down a bit, put it to a vote." He fished a handkerchief out of his bracer and used it to wipe up the blood, then tied it around Lavellan's foot in case the cut needed help staying closed. Only when he was sinking back into the settee with wine once again in hand did he really hear what had come out of his own mouth. "And then keep putting things to a vote. Create a senate! Elves and humans."

Before Dorian had quite settled, Lavellan put his free hand on Dorian's, around his goblet. Dorian froze, but all Lavellan did was pour his own wine in with Dorian's. "So, establish an elven city in the Free Marches and then institute an ancient Tevinter system of government," he said, making far too much eye contact throughout, then let go and placed his empty cup on the floor. Dorian looked away with some effort.

"Perhaps, er, conceal the source of the idea. Is His Worship the Herald of Andraste trying to get me drunk?"

"Like _this_?" Lavellan pointed at Dorian's now-brimming cup.

"The Inquisitor plays a long game. I'm happy to go and get another bottle or three if that really is your goal. I'm delightful when I'm drunk." Dorian drained off an inch of his wine before anything undignified or staining could happen.

Lavellan smiled a little, but his eyes were fixed somewhere far away. After finishing with what currently passed for the court of Wycome, he had changed out of his armor and into clothing Dorian supposed must be borrowed: shirt a bit large, trousers a bit high-water. A boy's clothes, probably, to fit him. Dorian forgot sometimes what a slip of a thing he was. In the light of the fireplace, even surrounded by the evidence of a rage and a grief both larger than Dorian could grasp, he looked earthly and touchable and normal: just a man with a problem, talking about it into the wee hours. "All this assumes that anyone will come. The Inquisition can't hold Wycome forever, and without new blood it will fall to looters."

"You're joking. I don't know about the Dalish, you all seem a very withholding bunch, but you've seen how the elves in the cities look at you. Lots of Andrastians there, too. They'll empty the alienages for you. The economy of the Free Marches is about to get _very_ interesting."

"Does that trust," Lavellan said slowly, "continue to extend to a man who failed his own clan completely?" He looked at his lap, then at the fire. "I won't cover it up."

It was the most Lavellan had given him since this all started, and Dorian had no idea what to do with it. He tried touching Lavellan's shoulder; Lavellan caught his breath, almost silently, and straightened in his seat, but didn't look over. What had he said when Dorian was low, after their meeting with his father? Foremost what Dorian remembered of that conversation was the feeling of having his thoughts reordered, of hearing something that put everything else before it in a new perspective. Brave, that was it. He'd called Dorian brave. How did a person acquire the skill of comforting with sincerity rather than wit?

"Good," he said at last. "They love you, so let them grieve with you."

Lavellan laughed once and turned his face away from Dorian. "You should sit in on strategic meetings."

"I'm not _advising_ you as a member of the Inquisitor's inner circle—not that I wouldn't bring numerous valuable insights to— That's not the point. I'm telling you, as your _friend_ , that when they hear the facts you mean to tell them anyway, they'll understand that you didn't fail, you were betrayed. The same people you champion will want to comfort you, and you should let them. You deserve that much. More than that."

They sat in silence long enough for Dorian to consider withdrawing his hand and perhaps also immolating himself, until Lavellan cut the tension by reaching up and curling his own hand over Dorian's on his shoulder. "Friends, are we?"

Dorian hoped that was bait, because he was taking it. "This didn't seem like the night to push my luck."

"I'd much rather argue about the nature of our relationship than think about what happened today."

" _Is_ this an argument?"

Lavellan finally looked at him again. Oh yes, here they went. "What would you prefer I called it?"

"Is there a list of alternatives, or am I to come up with something off the top of my head?"

Rather than answer, Lavellan released Dorian's hand and took him by the other, the one still holding his wine. Dorian looked at the cup and their joined hands in bewilderment, and was still looking at them an instant later when Lavellan leaned in and kissed him.

He'd wondered about this. Did the Dalish kiss? Lavellan had obviously caught the implications of that first time in the library, but he'd been around humans a while; he would have seen kissing. Surely sex had come into being at the same time all life did, but had someone, at some point, _invented_ kissing? Did _anyone_ other than humans and, Dorian supposed, city elves kiss?

They must, because Lavellan knew what he was about. Dorian could feel him holding back and didn't know what to want: more and more and more of these first explorations, almost chaste but with teeth and a simmering tension behind them, or the full brunt of Lavellan's desire. He made an invitation of his parted lips; Lavellan did not take it, but he did at least rise onto his knees and press Dorian up against the arm of the settee. Lavellan ran the backs of his blunt nails up Dorian's throat and around the back of his neck, and with a shiver he made no effort to conceal, Dorian's entire body caught up with the proceedings. How long, how long since someone had touched him like this? It had been so far down his list of priorities that Dorian had forgotten to miss it, until now. He tried to adjust his legs to let Lavellan between them, but there wasn't space for that maneuver, and he managed only to slosh wine over both their hands.

With a noise that seemed intended to communicate _stay put_ or _just a moment_ , Lavellan broke away from Dorian to put the offending cup on the floor. The worst of it had missed Dorian; he licked the backs of his own palm and thumb, called that good enough, and leaned in to apply his open mouth to the long exposed line of Lavellan's neck. The sound Lavellan made this time was not meant to convey anything, but did by its very unconsideredness: _yes; that; more_. Dorian ran his hand up Lavellan's back, over the folds of his borrowed shirt, and kissed his way up toward the hollow behind Lavellan's ear.

Lavellan began to raise his hand to his lips, but Dorian intercepted it. He kissed the corner of Lavellan's mouth, then lowered his head to lick away the rivulet of wine that had run down Lavellan's wrist and palm; he sucked the web of flesh between Lavellan's thumb and forefinger; he ran his tongue up the first two fingers of Lavellan's hand, lighter and lighter until, at the tips, he could barely taste them. Lavellan's breath hissed in through his teeth. When Dorian raised his eyes, he found Lavellan watching him with a stillness and focus that reminded Dorian vividly that all this man would say about his life from before the Inquisition was _I was a hunter_.

"This seems like a far better way to blow off energy than wrecking the furniture." Dorian kissed Lavellan's palm, then lifted his head to seek Lavellan's mouth again, only to find Lavellan sitting back on his heels, putting space between their bodies. The fascination was gone from his face.

"I take it back," Dorian said promptly. "This is a terrible idea, and wrecking the furniture is fantastic, so you should most certainly do this and not that. This is a neutral idea. Furniture, what furniture?" He let his head knock back against the arm of the settee and shut his eyes. "Lovely night for a spot of time travel, wouldn't you say?"

Lavellan's hand was still in Dorian's. He flexed his fingers, but made no attempt to pull it away. "You didn't say anything wrong, Dorian. This just isn't the foot I want to get off on with you."

Dorian opened his eyes in time to watch Lavellan realize what was about to come out of his mouth and that he was already too committed to the sentence to stop. The two of them shared a moment excruciatingly filled with unspoken entendres.

"What foot did you have in mind, exactly?" asked Dorian, at least.

"A slower one?" said Lavellan. Dorian stared at him.

"It's been _weeks_."

"You don't think that's rather fast?"

"I don't think—I think—you—" Dorian had to put his free hand over his own mouth to stop his spluttering. It struck him for the first time that holding hands while they had this conversation only made it odder, but an appropriate moment to let go did not present itself.

"Given what you've told me," Lavellan said falteringly, "I'd imagined you were accustomed to feeling men out slowly."

Dorian was grateful for the hand over his mouth now, for letting him catch a laugh before it escaped. "Rather the opposite. You meet a man, you ascertain he's interested, you satisfy an urge with him. Maybe you see him again, maybe it happens again, but just as likely you don't and it doesn't."

"All right, but relationships. You must have to be careful about those."

"Lavellan," Dorian said, as gently as he could, "between two men, they don't exist."

"Well, I'm not going to use you as an outlet for my frustrations," Lavellan said, with all his hesitation abruptly gone.

"Oh, come now, if anything—"

Lavellan cut him off by gathering Dorian's other hand up in his own as well. "What do you want, Dorian? If I offered you more, would you take me up on it?"

This must have been what true fear felt like. "I have no idea what _more_ entails."

"Neither have I." Lavellan's face hadn't been so warm or so alight at any point today. Dorian could feel another bad decision coming on. "We'll have to muddle through together."

"This is why you're the terror of southern Thedas," Dorian said. "This is exactly the attitude. 'No one ever does this because it's impossible, it contravenes centuries of tradition, and it's liable to get you set on fire.' 'Very well then, feet first!'"

"Is that a problem?"

"It's my favorite thing about you," Dorian grumbled. "Fine, fine, you twisted my arm, or held my hands or whatever it is we're doing here. Have it your way. No need to tell me there will be no sex on these premises tonight, I have ascertained this for myself and already begun retracting my manhood into my body, where it will resume its winter hibernation."

Lavellan laughed in a way Dorian rarely heard from him, the guffaw that said he found something equal parts bizarre and wonderful. He dropped Dorian's hands, took him by the collar, and kissed him—oh. Here it was, the full lavish interlocking of their mouths that Dorian had wanted. He slipped his arms around Lavellan, and Lavellan twisted and eased closer until their bodies were flush and he was sitting on Dorian's thigh. They found the give and take immediately; Lavellan pushed Dorian, then teased him, then pushed him again, delved into his mouth and then withdrew to graze Dorian's lips with his teeth. Oh, they were going to be good together. Dorian might not survive the wait.

Too soon, Lavellan began to disentangle himself: took his hands from Dorian's hair, shifted his weight out of Dorian's lap. Dorian let his arms fall away, and Lavellan stretched his legs and stood, idly touching his own mouth. "It's not long 'til dawn. We should both try to get some sleep."

"Yes, that should be easy," Dorian muttered.

"I'm sorry," Lavellan said, with that awful sincerity of his. "I'd invite you to join me, but you'd misbehave and I won't be good company."

"I take exception to that. Here." Dorian got to his feet and caught Lavellan by the arm, reeled him in. "If I can send legions of men and the occasional small dragon into screaming nightmares on the battlefield, the least I can do is give you a solid couple of hours of sleep." He cupped the side of Lavellan's head with his hand, stroked Lavellan's forehead with his thumb.

Lavellan had the rare ability to frown and smile at once. "You didn't do anything, did you."

"Shh, you'll ruin it. Magic is delicate. Go on, then."

With another puzzled frown, Lavellan leaned up to kiss Dorian on the cheek—Maker preserve them both—and took his leave on silent feet. Dorian retrieved the unspilled remainder of his wine and, why not, the rest of the bottle. He navigated his way through the wreckage of the room to a spot by the fireplace, where he could stand with his drink, and gaze into the flames, and contemplate his mistakes.


End file.
